In January 2011, the Wall Street Journal published Amy Chua's now infamous article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” With millions of comments, articles, and social media posts rushing to its attack or defense, one thing stands as extraordinary: the majority of readers did not read the blatantly racist title as at all ironic. Chua's headline was not shocking: it affirmed a belief embedded in our national psyche since the 1950s. And like fireworks to a combat veteran, her essentialist rehashing of racial hierarchies forced us to relive the painful construction of a racial order that affirmed whites as adjudicators of character and culture, made Asian Americans honorary whites, and placed the blame for African American and Latino struggles squarely on their own shoulders. Fifty years after its invention, the term “model minority” had mostly dropped from popular discourse – not because it was no longer significant but because the concept had become elemental to our social organization. It is a stereotype that took a group that was disturbingly not-white and rendered them comfortingly and “definitively not-black” (2). Ellen D. Wu's The Color of Success demonstrates how the model minority emerged as a racial conceptualization that served the agendas of many people, both within and outside the Asian American community. With the nimbleness to serve different historical moments, the label embodied the goals of many, from internationalist liberals to Reagan conservatives. Wu unpicks the tight seams that form the social identity of the model minority, and lets spill the complex confluence of racism, foreign policy, strategic navigation, and historic intersections that brought it into being. Understanding the origins of the model minority adds to knowledge of Asian Americans, but it also reconfigures understandings of race-making in the mid-twentieth-century US. The significance of Wu's book comes from its success in documenting the dynamics of concurrent identity formations – black, white, Asian, Latino, feminine, masculine, normal, deviant, loyal, dangerous, laboring, elite – both within and outside communities of belonging.

The Color of Success argues that despite extremely different – even opposing – socioeconomic and political histories, Chinese and Japanese Americans escaped the dangers of relocation, McCarthyism, ghettoization and racism through the protective, though limiting, identity of “model minority.” From a diverse matrix of primary source material – newspapers, films, government propaganda, interviews, Senate reports, institutional documents – The Color of Success documents the “historically contingent fabrication” of race-making (8). Twentieth-century American orientalism, inflamed with capitalist, imperialist, evangelical, pragmatic, fearful desire, conjoined the empires of China and Japan like twins: twins whose transplanted US identities would forever push and pull on one another. The valorization of the “good Chinese” demonstrated how the United States reciprocated patriotism with colorblind inclusivity, proving that the US war with Japan was not a race war. A decade later, the integration of Japanese Americans asserted the race-neutrality of Cold War anticommunism. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, and Americans fought literally and spiritually with the ever-densifying tangle of African American oppression, the qualified acceptance of the “oriental” face allowed whites access to an absolving racial utopia where the victims of racialized suffering could also bear the guilt of being its cause. Racial conservatives could use the successes of Asian Americans to argue that African Americans' failures were personal, not systemic. The idea of the model minority compartmentalized an acceptable location for Asians, buttressing the international reputation of the US, deflecting the outrage of the civil rights movement, and reinforcing the degradation of those who were not so “definitively not-black.”

Wu offers a history of the model minority that resists its constitutive tendency to be both totalizing and isolating. She foregrounds the struggles between political factions, generational groups, and economic interests, in Japanese and Chinese communities, documenting how some members encouraged and deployed the model-minority stereotype while others resisted it. Wu's exploration of yogore, or Japanese American zoot suit culture, prior to and during Japanese relocation offers a rich example of such resistance. The yogore embodied a rejection not simply of racial separatism, with their affinity with Latino and African American zoot suiters, but also of American ideals of gender and sexuality. Particularly when practiced within the confines of racialized incarceration, zoot suiters expressed the complexity of US racial oppression by explicitly acting in opposition to conforming modes of masculinity, domesticity, and legality. The cultural deviancy of yogore rejected each of the conforming components, and made explicit what race identity strove to elide. External forces also sought to abrade Asian American interethnic affiliations. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan idealized Chinatown's filial, gender-normative, home life as evidence for his report pathologizing African American domesticity. Yet Wu's research documents agential interethnic exchanges, citing how relocated Japanese internees learned to navigate urban social services through the help of African American organizations, and how Chinese Americans adopted the consumer strategy of promoting the patronage of racially progressive businesses, echoing the African Americans' “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaign. These relational identities and shared strategies, which emerged alongside and intertwined with the birth of the model-minority myth, complicate totalizing narratives of Asian American history.

The Color of Success serves as an excellent model for the kind of historical inquiry that it is very easy to say is imperative and very hard to execute: the grounded documentation of race-making as it intersects with relational identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) and historical conditions of emergence. It requires tracking and integrating multiple moving targets in a way that can be difficult to maintain evenly. For example, while gender and sexuality are foregrounded in Wu's early chapter examining yogore culture, some of the intersectional analysis diminishes in later parts of the book. In chapter 6, which explores the notion of nondelinquency in US Chinatowns, there seems a missed opportunity to highlight how internal criticism of Chinatown “punks” describes them as “sissies,” echoing the gender discomfort of yogore critics. Likewise, it would have been interesting to see Wu explore the gendering of civil rights-era political activism, and how the “Quiet Americans” opposed “militant blacks” in a way that reveals the intertwining of race, gender, and sexuality: who is the aggressor, who is passively available, and how this triangulates white identity. Yet given the complexity of what Wu's book attempts – to document relational and fluid identities as they move through time – these absences are better framed as avenues for future investigation than as criticisms. Work like Wu's challenges the metaphor of history as a mountain to which we each contribute a rock, building towards a pinnacle of truth; rather, it encourages imagining history as a collaborative mapping. Each new work of scholarship holds the opportunity to examine the landscape from an original point of view, documenting its observations and altering what was previously known. New historical findings are not so much additional as potentially transformational, as dead-end roads are discovered to be highways and what looked like ramparts emerge as temporary shelters. Documenting the histories of ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities does not expand the dimensions of the map, it alters understandings of what we thought we knew. And layer upon layer, the past, and the present that was shaped by it, emerges as navigable terrain.